With her new bestseller, “The Age of American Unreason,” Susan Jacoby adds fuel to the public bonfire. Americans are not only increasingly knowledge-challenged, she argues: they’re also proud of it. “America is now ill,” she writes, “with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism.” This new, insidious strain–at odds with reason, objective facts, and modern science–has grown over the past twenty years, she writes, and is incredibly dangerous for American culture and politics.
…For Jacoby, Protestant fundamentalism, particularly in its resistance to the teaching of evolution in public schools, is intellectual enemy number one.
Got that? It's not the curriculum based on self-esteem rather than actual results that's at fault. Nope. It's not the constant lowering of standards that's at fault. Nuh-uh. It's not the mediocrity of the teachers protected by tenure and a DNC backing union that's at fault. Nah, it's those damn religious whackos!
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Found at Cold Fury.
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